Condé Nast To Introduce New Print Products Within The Year

Charles H. Townsend, president and CEO of Condé Nast, says the company plans to introduce new products in — gasp! — print because print “attracts and engages” consumers like no other medium. Townsend also specifically mentions portability and easy navigation as benefits of print. Which is interesting.

This powerful bond magazines form with consumers is forged at retail — on newsstands, in display racks, and at the checkout counter in stores, shops and kiosks around the world. That’s where consumers, more often than not, first choose our product, forming what we can only hope is a lifelong media habit.

More after the jump.

He also emphasizes what he views as the credibility inherent in print media. Because it certainly is not the case that a print publication such as, say, Vogue, ever skews its product reviews or placements to please advertisers or anything of the sort.

Regardless of print magazine’s benefits, supposed credibility, or its relationship to readers, Townsend adds that Condé Nast also plans to introduce new, digitized content across various mobile platforms. Because, duh:

Condé Nast expects to publish that unique, digitized content across a wide array of devices by the middle of 2010 and will continue to evolve our efforts as the market and technologies mature. To be clear, we expect to reach mostly new consumers with this digitized content, consumers who have historically not selected magazines as their vehicle of choice for information and entertainment services.

It’s not a bad idea — nor a particularly revolutionary one at this point — to engage different kinds of readers and fans of one’s brand across different media. But what strikes us most is Coné Nast’s plans on introducing new, additional print products at a time when this industry has been titles fold, jobs disappear, and people cry out in the streets over the Death of Print.

While no specifics are given, Townsend does hope to introduce these new products within the year and that Coné Nast is open to new ideas for how to sell these to readers and retailers:

We are working on a plan to introduce new quality print products into the marketplace and are absolutely open to all new ideas to drive retail sales growth in 2010 and beyond.

Feisty. The company has already shared its plan to release digital, iPad versions of five major publications within the coming months, including Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Glamour.